Today, most industrial installations and production facilities have modern and effective systems for data acquisition and storage with eg fiber-optic communications, databases, and so on. A problem is that users are often not able to extract all the information that is hidden in the acquired data, because in part, the amount of process data is enormous. Even though historical data is easily available, the user may need assistance help to locate process segments behaving abnormally, to gather information about that, and to arrive at a diagnosis of a condition or status of a process or equipment.
In the field of process control in industrial plants IT is used as a strategic tool to make work tasks and decision processes more efficient. For example in the extended oil and gas sector, an extensive reallocation of work tasks between sea and land and between operators and suppliers is underway. The result includes new work processes where personnel, often in different locations, interact using IT and live data integrated in the work processes. Use of IT creates opportunities in control, monitoring and maintenance in the form of new advanced functions. A greater degree of automation of functions currently handled manually, i.e. data collation, report generation, planning, initiation, notification and coordination of tasks is developing.
Common ways of presenting data is mostly done using desktop computer screens, which limit the user to interact with the system in 2D, using keyboard, mouse or similar to browse through a series of process pictures and related data. Use of desktop screens also limits the numbers of users and therefore hinders collaboration possibilities between local and/or remote users.